"Listening to poets read their work in the barn, you can almost feel Frost’s presence..."
2016 Hyla Brook Reading Series
Join a community of poets and poetry lovers who gather in the intimate setting of Robert Frost's barn to hear nationally-acclaimed poets read their work. Except for June, readings begin Thursdays at 6:30pm, include a reading by a Hyla Brook poet before the featured reader and are followed by an open mic. All readings are free and open to the public. For easy reminders, click the icons at bottom of the page and follow us on social media.
Anton Yakovlev - Thursday, May 19, 6:30pm
Originally from Moscow, Russia, Anton Yakovlev lives in Ridgewood, New Jersey and works as a college textbook editor. He studied filmmaking and poetry at Harvard University. His work is published or forthcoming in The New Yorker, Fulcrum, American Arts Quarterly, Measure, The Raintown Review, The New Verse News and elsewhere. He is the author of chapbooks Neptune Court (The Operating System, 2015) and The Ghost of Grant Wood (Finishing Line Press, 2015). Yakovlev co-hosts the Carmine Street Metrics reading series in New York City. He has also directed several short films.
Special Event:
Frost Farm Poetry Conference Keynote Speaker Timothy Steele
& Frost Farm Prize Winner James Najarian - Friday, June 17, 7pm
Since the early 1970s, Timothy Steele has written, discussed, and taught poetry, and in all three activities, he has contributed to renewing and sustaining interest in traditional poetic craft. His books of poems include Uncertainties and Rest (1979), Sapphics Against Anger and Other Poems (1986), The Color Wheel (1994), and Toward the Winter Solstice (2006). His literary criticism appears in Missing Measures (1990) and All the Fun’s in How You Say a Thing (1999). He has also edited The Poems of J. V. Cunningham (1997) and has published essays on various topics, including two on Robert Frost. Among Steele’s honors are a Stegner Fellowship in Creative Writing from Stanford University, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Peter I. B. Lavan Younger Poets Award from the Academy of American Poets, and the Los Angeles PEN Center’s Literary Award for Poetry.
James Najarian grew up on a goat farm near Kempton, Pennsylvania. He teaches nineteenth-century poetry and prose at Boston College, where he directs the PhD program in English and edits the scholarly journal Religion and the Arts. His poetry has been published in West Branch, Christianity and Literature, Tar River Poetry, Southern Poetry Review, The Literary Imagination, and other journals. He also published a scholarly monograph, Victorian Keats, with Palgrave Macmillan. His manuscript of poems, An Introduction to the Devout Life, has made finalist several times at volume contests, and is seeking a publisher.
Alice B. Fogel - Thursday, July 14, 6:30pm
Alice B. Fogel is NH’s poet laureate. Her newest poetry collection, Interval: Poems Based on Bach’s “Goldberg Variations,” won the Nicholas Schaffner Award for Music in Literature. Her third book, Be That Empty, was a national poetry bestseller, and she is also the author of the guide for readers and teachers, Strange Terrain, on how to appreciate poetry without necessarily “getting” it. She lives in Walpole, NH.
Melissa Balmain - Thursday, August 11, 6:30pm
Melissa Balmain is the Editor of Light, America's premier journal of comic verse. She teaches humor writing, poetry writing, and journalism at the University of Rochester. Though she has received the Able Muse Book Award and twice been a finalist for the Howard Nemerov Sonnet Award, some of her favorite prizes are Abe Lincoln bobbleheads, salt and pepper shakers that look like outhouses, and other classy items she has won in the Style Invitational, The Washington Post’s weekly humor contest. Her poems have appeared in such places as American Arts Quarterly, American Life in Poetry, Lighten Up Online, Measure, Mezzo Cammin, Poetry Daily, and The Spectator (UK); her prose in The New Yorker, The New York Times, McSweeney’s, and Success. Her poetry collection Walking In on People (Able Muse Press), is often assumed by online shoppers to be some kind of porn.
Johnny Longfellow - Thursday, September 8, 6:30pm
Johnny Longfellow has served for 20 years as a mentor to Newburport, MA high school students through the Poetry Soup reading program. The editor of BAD ACID LABORATORIES, INC., his own poetry has appeared in journals devoted to formal verse, such as The Barefoot Muse, The Road Not Taken, and The Rotary Dial, and in other small-press publications such as The Five Two, Horror Sleaze Trash, The Literary Hatchet, Ppigpenn, and Stepping Stones Magazine.
